Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Another Year

I’m back in India again after a brilliant month in the UK:
getting to spend some quality time with my family, catch up with a lot of great
friends and attend two weddings.

I’ve just been granted my visa extension, giving me another
year in India and allowing me to finish my contract with SELCO. Getting the 40+
page paperwork together provided the usual adventure through Indian bureaucracy
with multiple trips to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office and a slight
moment of panic when they’d finally accepted my documents and I was told I
needed to bring a bankers ‘demand draft’ for the payment by the next day or the
application would be discarded, only to find out that most of the banks in
Bangalore were on strike.

SELCO Foundation has just launched a Sustainable Energy
Challenge (http://sustainableenergychallenge.org/) to encourage students in Bangalore to engage with issues of
poverty and energy security, and hopefully give us some ideas for new projects
we can start up. I gave a few talks at some universities in Bangalore during
the launch and so, along with my need to be there for my visa application, I’ve
spent a fair bit of time in Bangalore recently. This resulted in the first time
in a long time that I’ve managed to make two consecutive church services, and I
tried to make the most of being able to meet up with various church friends which
has been a real blessing and I feel I’ve got to know people a lot better.

I also managed my first proper clubbing in Bangalore. All venues
in Karnataka have to close by 11pm, as dictated by the rather draconian, right
wing Hindu ruling party. This rule is interestingly very well enforced by the
police, but it turned out one of our interns in the Bangalore office, Emmy,
knew the right people and took us along to a private club at a hotel. It was
still finished by 1.30 but we felt pretty cool/rebellious being out so late and
certainly had a lot of fun.

I was welcomed back to Ujire by lots of rain and a mouldy
flat. We’re pretty close to 100% humidity most of the time during the monsoon
and everything, including books, clothes, walls and even furniture, develops a
tendency to grow mould. It’s a constant battle during this period to keep
things aerated and keep the moisture out so I was fully expecting to find
things as they were, having not been able to fight it while back in the UK, but
it was still a bit of a miserable reception.

We’ve got several new interns here at the moment including Seb
and Graeme, two guys from the UK who are doing a placement through Engineers
Without Borders, similar to the one I started out with here back in 2010. It’s
nice to have so much activity again and lots of people to do stuff with in the
evenings and weekends. I’d forgotten how much fun you can have just playing
cards and board games, but without much else to do around town, they’ve taken a
fairly prominent position in our social life.

I’m not planning to leave India for the next year or so now.
It was strange to think, as I boarded the plane, that I wouldn’t be back for so
long, although not nearly as daunting as I’d expected it would be. I’m feeling
very settled here now and even though it may lack a lot of the comforts I’m
used to in the UK, and I still find it difficult to communicate properly with a
lot of people here, I feel somehow at home.

Seb, Graeme, Vishal and me visiting one of the many local waterfalls

Turns out we chose the wrong day to visit this viewpoint

I’d given the dehusker to a bunch of students to complete
the manufacture and run some tests as part of their master’s project. This is
them when they’d just finished the manufacture:

And this is rice that came through after the very first run.
Actually a better rate of dehusking than I was expecting:

Seb has now taken on this project and is testing various materials
for the dehusking plates; trying to maximise durability without compromising on the
quality of dehusking.

Here are some women using a manual areca dehusker that we were trialling